Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (16 page)

The completed “Mad as hell” sequence—from the moment the drenched and bewildered Beale, seated at his anchor’s desk and wearing a trench coat over his pajamas, begins to address the camera (“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression”) to the moment Max Schumacher’s daughter, Caroline, looks out a window of her family’s living room to hear all of New York City shouting its cacophonous chorus of anger and despair—contains thirty edits: nine different reaction shots of Diana growing in her elation, racing out of the control room and into an office to discover that they are also shouting in Atlanta and Baton Rouge; three of Harry Hunter feeding broadcast data to Diana and instructing his director to keep his cameras on Beale; one of the director repeating Hunter’s orders; and various shots of the speech (as previously recorded on videotape) playing on the Schumachers’ home television while Max watches with his family in dismay.

The rest of the scene, when it is not being covered or elongated by these cuts, is a seemingly continuous take from a crane-operated camera, pointed from above at Beale (“Everybody’s out of work, or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust”), then slowly zooming and pushing in on the increasingly agitated broadcaster (“We sit watching our teevees while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be”), lowering its aim until it is almost even with his livid face and condemning blue eyes (“All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, goddammit. My life has value’”). Then it follows Beale around the studio as he emerges from behind his desk, past a startled stagehand and his floor director, to implore his viewers that they must get as upset as he is: “I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell:
I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!
”

Chayefsky may have been a stickler for the written word, but he was not able to prevent Finch from inserting an extra
as
into Beale’s repeated expression of maximum frustration (the screenplay simply read “I’m mad as hell”). No changes were possible to Shot F of Scene 99, as the master shot of the “Mad as hell” speech was delineated in the official filming record of
Network
, because Lumet attempted it only twice, and Finch completed it only once.

Lumet had anticipated that the scene would be difficult for Finch, and he prepared by having an additional camera on set, already loaded with film and ready to go so that a second attempt at the speech could be filmed as soon as the first one was finished. (“No reloading,” the director explained. “No time lost between takes.”) But on Take 2, Finch halted himself one minute and ten seconds into his delivery, just as Beale was proclaiming that he didn’t want his audience members writing to their congressmen “because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write.”

“Between the length of the speech and the amount of emotion it took, he just ran out of gas,” Lumet said. “He stopped halfway through. He said, ‘Sidney, I can’t do any more.’” That was as much as the director was willing to ask of Finch, whose portion of the scene was assembled from the first half of Take 2 and the second half of Take 1.

*   *   *

Beginning on Friday, January 23, and for the week that followed, the production moved to the CFTO-TV soundstage that housed the new, Savonarola-style UBS
Network News Hour
. The set was built upon giant turntables that Lumet chose to have rotated by stagehands who would be seen on-screen—partly to let the audience in on the illusion of television, and partly because a winch to spin the stage mechanically was not available—and it was decorated with what appeared to be a stained-glass window but was in fact a painted piece of canvas that production designer Philip Rosenberg had sprayed with gelatin and carried underneath his arm on his plane ride to Canada.

One morning during the week of January 26, a reporter for the
Toronto Sun
found Chayefsky in the CFTO-TV cafeteria. The screenwriter was poorly rested, having been awoken at 5:00
A.M.
by his anxieties after a night of fitful sleep, and not much calmer as he tore into a plate of scrambled eggs and toast. When Kay Chapin, the script supervisor, sat next to him, he noticed her toasted cheese and tomato sandwich.

“That looks better than what I’ve got,” Chayefsky said with ostensible purpose.

“Want me to get you one?” Chapin offered.

“No,” he replied.

“I’ll get you one,” she said. “It’ll only take a minute.”

“No,” he said, “I’ve got to go now anyway.”

“Take mine,” she said. “I’ll get another.”

“No,” he said, abandoning his breakfast altogether. “I’m not hungry. I didn’t sleep last night. Not at all.”

On the
Network
set, Finch was running through the last substantial speech he would perform as Howard Beale, after the character’s philosophy is corrupted by his pro-corporate lecture from Arthur Jensen (“The time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word?”). A studio audience of hundreds of extras watched him pace the stage while Lumet observed, from on high, in a control room suspended two stories above the scene.

The director’s voice rang out from a studio loudspeaker: “Peter, would it be convenient for you to start from ‘The world is mass-producing people the way we mass-produce our food’?”

Finch silently waved to the booth and performed the scene again. “Is that what you wanted, Sidney?”

The disembodied voice answered, “Peter my dear, we’re just waiting for the playback. Just relax.”

A fidgety Chayefsky had also been watching the retake from down below and was stewing, not so quietly, over one of Lumet’s directorial choices. “There’s a gag line in this speech that Sidney loves,” he said, “and I’m afraid he loves it too much. It should be murmured, mumbled almost—not spoken. It’s a throwaway line, see, and it’s only funny when it’s done that way.” When the
Toronto Sun
reporter asked him what precisely
Network
was about, Chayefsky was evasive, except to say that “it’s all fabricated, all fiction. And it’s all true.”

Once the journalist left the studio, conditions were clear to film the climactic sequence that Chayefsky and Gottfried were determined that the media not learn about in advance: Beale’s assassination by the Ecumenical Liberation Army.

Arthur Burghardt, who played the militant group’s leader, the Great Ahmed Kahn, was one of two actors in the studio audience directed to rise up on cue and pretend to shoot Beale dead with prop machine guns loaded with blanks. One impediment to his successful completion of the task, Burghardt later recalled, was the gun itself. “The blanks were spewing out cotton,” he said. “Some of that was on fire, and I was afraid that I would hit somebody with that. We got people to move aside a little bit, so that no one’s hair would be caught on fire.”

The other obstacle was Burghardt’s realization that, as usual, Eletha and Diana Finch were on set, and he hurried to tell Peter about the oversight. “He was about ready to get killed,” Burghardt said. “And I told him, ‘Peter, you know Eletha’s up there and the baby’s up there.’” Once informed, Finch was just as determined to make sure his wife and daughter did not see him violently murdered: “She’s what? Eletha! Eletha! Take her out! No, no, no, no, you can’t see this!”

Then the Great Ahmed Kahn pulled his trigger, and Howard Beale became “the first known instance of a man being killed because he had lousy ratings.” “Everybody in the place—everybody in the studio, everybody in the cast, everybody in the crew—that evening was very sad,” said Burghardt. “There was a sadness. As they dollied up to look at his wounds and to fade to black, we were just all dumbfounded. I was. I went and drank myself to sleep that night. I didn’t think that the American people would understand what we were really saying.”

*   *   *

At the start of February,
Network
resumed production in New York. Despite the many hours of effort expended and reels of film recorded in Toronto, it was not certain that all the members of its cast would continue on this itinerary. Nearly every actor, at some point or another, had choked on a mouthful of Chayefsky’s magniloquent, pleonastic dialogue, but Dunaway seemed to be struggling with it more than most.

“If you look at the movie closely, you’ll see that Faye fumbles a few places,” said its editor, Alan Heim. “Those were hard speeches. But she worked. I mean, she
worked
.”

Her dedication was almost not quite enough to satisfy Lumet, who began to consider firing her from the movie.

“At one point,” said Heim, “Sidney came to me, early on in the shooting in New York, by the time we got there, and said he was thinking of replacing Faye. And I said, ‘Why would you do that? She’s so good.’ And he said, ‘Well, she’s having trouble with the words.’ I said, ‘Who would you replace her with at this point?’”

Lumet named a specific actress, though Heim declined to say whom the director had in mind.

Heim, who had started to review the raw footage from the Toronto shoot, defended Dunaway: “I said, ‘No, no, you can’t do that—the energy that this woman is bringing to the part.’ Sidney agreed with me on that. And the next thing I knew, she was not replaced.” Almost immediately, Dunaway would make her allies regret this show of support.

Though the rehearsals for
Network
appeared to have gone smoothly for her, she was growing uneasy about a sequence with William Holden in which Diana enumerates to Schumacher the details of a federal investigation facing
The Mao Tse Tung Hour
(“Hackett told the FBI to fuck off. We’re standing on the First Amendment, freedom of the press, and the right to protect our sources”) and how she plans to use media coverage to the show’s benefit (“I said, ‘Walter, let the government sue us! We’ll take them to the Supreme Court! We’ll be front page for months!’”).

Also, while Diana is providing this continuous one-way commentary, she and Max are enjoying a candlelit dinner at an Italian restaurant; undressing each other in a Long Island motel room; engaging in sexual foreplay; and, as Chayefsky’s stage directions describe the scene, “groping, grasping, gasping and fondling” each other into “a fever of sexual hunger,” until “Diana mounts Max” and “the screen is filled with the voluptuous writhings of love” as “Diana cries out with increasing exultancy.” Then, finally: “She screams in consummation, sighs a long, deliciously shuddering sigh, and sinks softly down into Max’s embrace. For a moment, she rests her head on Max’s chest, eyes closed in feline contentment.”

Dunaway would later say that her fundamental concern with the sequence was not its explicit sexuality, but the vigorous rush of verbiage it required her to deliver. “There is not a second of it when the dialogue stops,” she said. “The speed of it parallels the rhythm of their lovemaking.” Compared to the nearly silent scene she shared with Steve McQueen in
The Thomas Crown Affair
, where their characters seduce each other with gestures (and the provocative fondling of some chess pieces), the motel rendezvous in
Network
is driven almost entirely by her dialogue. “I could not afford to stumble on a single word; it would have killed the momentum of the scene,” Dunaway said. “It was the exact opposite of ‘sex as chess,’ five minutes of quiet seduction.”

But this was not how Dunaway presented her apprehensions to Lumet and Gottfried. As the New York shoot commenced, starting with a few uncomplicated moments in the Beale and Schumacher apartments, Gottfried recalled, “She says to Sidney, ‘I’m not going to do that scene. I don’t have to do it.’”

Dunaway was right in this respect: according to long-standing rules of the Screen Actors Guild, the participation of a performer in a nude scene required her agreement with the scene and her written consent. She could not be forced to appear naked on-screen. Furthermore, Dunaway was uncomfortable with the idea of acting out an orgasm, as the scene required. (She would also later say that it was Holden, not she, who “came very close to not doing the love scene”: “There were long talks about it. He had a strongly held belief that making love was a private thing that should not be exposed by film.”)

The
Network
creative team was thoroughly baffled, as much by Dunaway’s refusal as by her sudden display of modesty: she had, after all, been seen wearing just as little or less in films such as
Bonnie and Clyde
and
Chinatown
. Lumet had tried to make the case to her that the nudity in the scene was not prurient or gratuitous, but necessary to convey its reality, and would be handled in a tasteful way. Where he failed, Chayefsky attempted to convince Dunaway that the sequence was comedic; it was funny—after all, he had written it—and it was necessary to establish Diana as a woman who derives her pleasure primarily from her professional success. (At the recommendation of MGM executive Daniel Melnick, Chayefsky had already deleted a scene in which Diana, on a visit to Los Angeles, surreptitiously slips into a gay bar and hires a bisexual “stud hustler” to service her in her hotel room. That sequence would have culminated in another sex act and, for Diana, “an unhappy climax”: “tears are streaming down her cheeks. She cries a short little GRUNT of consummation, sighs deeply, closes her eyes.” In his notes to Chayefsky, Melnick described it tersely but accurately as a “tough scene.”)

Even so, Gottfried said, “She wouldn’t budge.” He, too, made a visit to Dunaway in her
Network
trailer, where he planned to reiterate the arguments that Lumet and Chayefsky had already laid out. Only this time, Gottfried said, “Her lawyer was there. And he said, ‘Look, she doesn’t want to do it.’”

Presented with this startling ultimatum, Gottfried and his partners were forced to consider two equally unappealing courses of action: they could cut the motel sequence or they could cut Dunaway. “There’s no sense in kidding yourself,” Gottfried said. “We had already shot ten days of the movie, and that costs money, and she was in a lot of it. To threaten to fire her—which we were going to do; we were not going to put up with that—could be quite foolhardy. You could say, ‘Look, I’m firing you,’ and the studio’s saying, ‘Bullshit, you’re firing her—to hell with the
scene
.’”